SILVER AND CAMEO GLASS

Roman moralists extolled the austere life-style of the founders of the republic and condemned luxury and conspicuous expense. The historian Livy (59 BC-AD 17), for example, traced the origin of'foreign luxury' to soldiers returning from a successful campaign against the Hellenistic kingdom of Antiochus III in Syria in 186 BC. These men 'first brought to Rome bronze couches, precious coverings, curtains and other textiles, and also what they considered magnificent furniture in those days'. He quoted Cato (234-149 BC), the republican general and censor (a magistrate who supervised the morals and conduct of citizens), complaining how'the state suffers from two diverse vices, avarice and luxury, those pests which have overturned all great empires'. Pliny the Elder (see p. 150) said that victories over the Hellenistic kingdoms had done less harm to the defeated than to the Romans, who 'learned not just to admire foreign opulence but actually to love it'. They became, he said, 'not only mad for silver in great quantity, but perhaps even crazier for it in the form of works of art'. In contrast, he recalled a patrician in the time of the republic who had bought for an extravagant sum two cups by a famous Greek artist, 'but from a sense of shame he never dared to use them'. Later, with the expanding empire and its large and increasingly rich upper-class, the taste for ostentatious splendour and the luxury objects with which to express it also increased and was indulged with fewer inhibitions. Admonitions from disapproving moralists continued and were to be taken up by Christians, though without any noticeable effect.

Silver vessels graced the tables of relatively modest houses in the provincial city of Pompeii and magnificent, even sumptuous, pieces of Roman silver have been found on the frontiers of the empire. Some of the finest were dug up (in 1868) at Hildesheim in northern Germany, though how they came to be buried there is a mystery. They appear to date from the time of Augustus and were made in Italy (as Latin inscriptions recording their weights reveal), perhaps by some immigrant artist from the Near East. The high relief of the goddess Athene on a partly gilded silver dish is a miniature work of sculpture in the Hellenistic tradition (5,25). The Classical balance and form of the figure and the high quality of its execution reflected the owner's cultivated taste just as its weight in silver and gold indicated his wealth. The association of luxury with the 'perfumed East' may account for the persistence of motifs derived from Hellenistic art on Roman silver as late as the fourth century.

Other luxury objects prized by rich Romans were carvings in such semiprecious hard stones as onyx (5,58). The very ancient art of engraving hard stones to serve as seals (see p. 54 and 2,3; p. 63 and 2,20) had been practised with great refinement in ancient Greece where such gems, as they are usually called, were incised so that impressions would show the designs in relief. Cameos carved in relief - not for use as seals but as independent works of art - were an invention of the Hellenistic period. They were normally carved from pieces of onyx, which have strata of contrasting colors; one was used for the background, the others for figures in relief. Numerous examples dating from the last years of the republic and from the empire period are signed by their engravers, whose names were almost invariably Greek. A similar technique was used for the decoration of glass by carving the outer surface of a vessel blown by a tricky technique from molten glass of two different colors, called cased or cameo glass. The process of glass-blowing originated in Syria in the mid-first century BC and soon afterwards Syrian glass-workers settled in Italy where the finest surviving examples of cameo glass were made, probably during the reign of Augustus. The Portland Vase (5,26) is among the finest, a tour-de-force of the glass carver's skill. It is decorated with a mythological scene which may have alluded to Augustus but was rendered in the most artificially mannered of Hellenistic styles. Its exquisite refinement combined with its sumptuous physicality must have impressed as well as delighted its owner's guests as, of course, it was intended to do. period. (They were the first women artists, or at any rate, the first professional women artists, so far as is known. None is recorded in Classical Greece.) The mosaic is carried out in the limited range of four colors - black, white, red and yellow with their intermediate tones - to which some Greek painters of the fifth and fourth centuries are known to have restricted their palettes.

As we have already seen, the battle of Issus is possibly represented on the Alexander Sarcophagus (5,1). In the relief the subject is elevated to universal significance by generalization -the warriors are all given equal prominence, though three Greeks, each with an expiring Persian at his feet, stand out in the melee - whereas in the mosaic everything is particularized. The artist concentrated on the vividness of the scene, which is shown as it was thought to have really happened. An actual incident appears to be depicted, the vital moment when the battle turned into a rout as the Persians took to their heels, though, of course, this is an imaginary reconstruction. A bareheaded Greek youth, Alexander, advancing from the left and spearing a cavalryman, faces the Persian King of Kings Darius, who turns towards him with a helpless gesture and expression while his charioteer raises his whip to lash his horses into a galloping retreat. There are no nudes or symbolical elements, except perhaps for the blasted tree, which balances the head of the defeated Darius. Emphasis is laid on the drama of the moment, registered by the movement of the ranked spears -a brilliantly effective visual device.

Figures in the mosaic are robustly modelled with shading to give them weight and substance; they move through clearly lit space, casting shadows on the ground. Indeed, light is rendered as in no surviving earlier work except those at Vergina, with reflections and highlights glancing off bared swords and glittering on armour. All the pictorial devices learned in the Classical period (so the ancient literary sources tell us) have here been exploited to give an appearance of movement in three dimensions. Figures are shown in a great variety of natural attitudes and from as many viewpoints - the head of one is turned away and his terrified face reflected in a polished shield. Rearing, shying, bolting horses are delineated with complete command of foreshortening, notably that to the right of centre, seen from behind and held by a Persian groom, who gazes apprehensively towards Alexander.

So skilful is the execution of this mosaic that some impression of the fluid brushwork of the original painting can even be recaptured in the mind's eye. The picture is built up from tiny tesserae or cubes of carefully graded naturally colored stone, by a technique that seems to have been invented in the third century BC - previously figurative mosaics had been composed of small pebbles, as at Pella (5,8). Small mosaic pictures, called emblemata, were produced as works of art independently of the usually less subtly colored and more broadly treated ornamental mosaics set in floors and wall surfaces. Their origin is unknown. They may have been imported ready-made from the eastern Mediterranean. All that is certain is that they reflect artistic tastes which upper-class Romans shared with the upper class of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Pompeii and Herculaneum were provincial cities and not major centres of wealth and artistic patronage in anyway comparable with Alexandria or Rome. They may, therefore, give a somewhat misleading impression of Hellenistic and Roman painting, though we necessarily depend on them for much of our visual knowledge of it. Very rarely do paintings from Pompeii and Herculaneum equal the technical accomplishment of the battle of Issus mosaic. Relatively few rise above the level of rapidly daubed hackwork. A painted room in a large country house known as the Villa of the Mysteries, just outside Pompeii, is altogether exceptional (5,17). There has been much discussion about its authorship (Greek or south Italian) and also whether it was copied from an earlier prototype. For although the composition is so carefully adapted to the size and shape of the room that it might seem to have been determined by it, individual figures are in poses that occur in Hellenistic sculpture.

The subject of this painting - still not completely elucidated - seems to be some form of initiation. Prominent are the ritual flagellation of a woman and the toilet of a bride under the gaze of a seated priestess, perhaps the mistress of the villa. One wall is given up to immortals with Ariadne reclining in the lap of Dionysus, symbol of the eternal bliss of the initiate who espoused the god. Dionysus, son of Zeus, was a god of the fertility of nature, a suffering god who died and came to life again; he was also the god of wine who inspired music, dance and drama. His cult had been introduced from the Near East to Greece and thence to Italy (where he was called Bacchus) as had other, more esoteric cults in the westward migration of Oriental spiritualism during the last two centuries before Christ.

There is nothing orgiastic about this painting, none of the delirious intoxicated frenzy of the devotees of Dionysus as depicted on Greek vases. Both mortals and immortals look distinctly cool and collected - apart from one apparently terrorized figure, though even she maintains her statuesque deportment. They are represented a little less than life-size, standing on a simulated stage or platform which runs round the room so that they seem to move in a shallow extension of the real space, giving the impression almost of a tableau vivant. Furthermore, they look across the real space of the room, with some rather complicated and sophisticated results, as when the flagellator raises her whip to strike the woman kneeling on the adjoining wall. Anyone coming into the room is given an embarrassingly vivid sensation of having intruded into a religious ceremony, of interrupting some solemn and arcane ritual.

If the ritual scene in the Villa of the Mysteries is a unique survivor, the illusionism of the architectural framework in which it is set is characteristic of painting in Italy of this period. Ambitious - spatial and not flat - decorative schemes appeared early in the first century BC, visually enlarging the space of rooms with columns, entablatures and other architectural elements. Figurative scenes were often incorporated, as if they were panel pictures hanging on or set in the walls. Later, a further step was taken by visually opening the wall, sometimes completely, sometimes with make-believe windows, to disclose vistas of colonnades stretching into the far distance. In the first century AD this imaginary architecture was treated with increasing fantasy to conjure up buildings of a more insubstantial elegance than any that could be erected on earth. Recession was indicated by a perspective system apparently devised for theatrical scenery, probably in the Hellenistic East, though it may have had Italian origins as well, with orthogonals or lines of perspective projection slanting towards a central axis (not towards a single vanishing-point, see p. 431).

These various types of painting are usually categorized as the Pompeiian Styles I, II, III and IV, though there is, of course, no reason to suppose that they followed one another in strict sequence. The development was additive, not sequential. Nor did they originate at Pompeii, though by far the largest number of examples have survived there. One room in the house of evidently prosperous merchants combines all four illusionistic systems or styles - a dado of simulated panels of rare marbles; pictures hung on or set in the wall and surrounded by frames which seem to project forwards; windows opening on to views of airy structures; and, above, statues placed on top of the wall, beyond which fanciful buildings maybe glimpsed in space (5,28). Sometimes the 'pictures' were of fruit, dead fish and game and glass vessels half full of water (the earliest known still lifes), themselves exercises in eye-deceiving illusionism or trompe I'oeil, creating a complex and sophisticated play with levels of reality - illusionistic paintings of trompe I'oeil pictures set in walls which were given the appearance of having relief decorations and also openings on to the world beyond! Deception in art is pleasurable, wrote the late Roman man of letters Philostratus the Younger about AD 300. For, he asked rhetorically,'to confront objects which do not exist as though they existed and to be influenced by them, to believe that they do exist, is not this, since no harm can come of it, a suitable and irreproachable means of providing entertainment?' Mythological scenes such as those in the House of the Vettii (5,28) may, however, have had for those who commissioned them greater significance than meets the modern eye. The Roman house was a shrine and place of sacrifice as well as a human habitation. Its main living rooms were under the protection of different deities, who might be represented on their walls: Bacchus in the triclinium or dining-room, Venus in the cubiculum or bedroom. Paintings might also indicate cultural and social status: Greek subject-matter for educated upper-class taste, decorative profusion and opulence for the newly rich - an appearance of wealth, sometimes a doubly deceptive one. Accelerated social mobility in the Italian cities of the first century BC had created an increasingly complex social structure, which made visible indications of social standing desirable. But Vitruvius on Roman Painting Vitruvius Pollio was a military architect in the service of Julius Caesar and later Augustus. In his old age he wrote, for Augustus, a book on architecture which is the only treatise by an ancient artist or architect to survive. His account of Roman painting sheds some light on taste in the age of Augustus.

... For other apartments, that is, those used for spring, autumn, and summer, and also in atriums and peristyles, clearly defined principles for depicting objects were derived by the ancients from prototypes which really existed in nature. For a picture is an image of something which either really exists or at least can exist -for instance, men, buildings, ships, and other things from whose clearly-defined and actually existent physical forms pictorial representations are derived by copying. Following this principle, the ancients, who first undertook to use polished wall surfaces, began by imitating different varieties of marble revetments in different positions, and then went on to imitate cornices, hard stones, and wedges arranged in various ways with relation to one another.

Later they became so proficient that they would imitate the forms even of buildings and the way columns and gables stood out as they projected from the background; and in open spaces, such as exedrae, because of the extensiveness of the walls, they depicted stage facades in the tragic, comic, or satyric style. Their walls, because of the extended length of the wall space, they decorated with landscapes of various sorts, modeling these images on the features of actual places. In these are painted harbors, promontories, coastlines, rivers, springs, straits, sanctuaries, groves, mountains, flocks, and shepherds. In places there are some designs done in the megalographic style representing images of the gods or narrating episodes from mythology, or, no less often, scenes from the Trojan war, or the wanderings of Odysseus over the landscape backgrounds, and other subjects, which are produced on the basis of similar principles from nature as it really is.

But these, which were representations derived from reality, are now scorned by the undiscriminating tastes of the present. ?For now there are monstrosities painted on stuccoed walls rather than true-to-life images based on actual things - instead of columns the structural elements are striated reeds; instead of gables there are ribbed appendages with curled leaves and volutes. Candelabra are seen supporting figures of small shrines, and, above the gables of these, many tender stalks with volutes grow up from their roots and have, without it making any sense whatsoever, little seated figures upon them. Not only that, but there are slender stalks which have little half-figures, some with human heads and some with beasts' heads.

Such things do not exist, nor could they exist, nor have they ever existed. Consequently it is the new tastes which have brought about a condition in which bad judges who deal with incompetent art have the power to condemn real excellence in the arts.

(Vitruvius, de Architectura, tr. M. H. Morgan, Vitruvius: The Ten Books of Architecture, Cambridge, Mass. 1914)

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aesthetic factors must also have been involved. Decorations on walls and ceilings were by no means limited to paintings and mosaics. Some of the most elegantly refined of all are in stucco.

Landscapes, or rather figurative compositions in landscape settings - airy little country scenes with trees, rustic buildings, a few pensive figures and sometimes a herm - were often incorporated in decorative schemes. The finest surviving examples, from a house in Rome, illustrate eight scenes from the Odyssey, framed by simulated pilasters (5,19). Their artist created evocative atmospheric effects of cool Mediterranean water and warm still air with the headlands of a bay shimmering in a slight haze. Distance is suggested and the forms of boats and rocks only vaguely defined, but the painting opens the wall surface on to the crystalline dream-world of poetry. Some of the energetic little figures are labelled with their names in (not always correct) Greek lettering and it is assumed that the artist was of Greek origin, though it is impossible to say for certain whether his work was original or copied from an earlier composition, a painting on the inner wall of a stoa, perhaps, or even an illustrated manuscript. But here we stand on the frontier, or rather the overlap, of Hellenistic and Roman art.

Pliny ascribed to an artist of the Augustan period named Studius Ludius or Spurius Tadius - the manuscripts give different readings, but he must have been Italian if not strictly Roman - 'that most delightful way of painting walls with representations of villas, porticoes [see Glossary] and landscape gardens, woods, groves, hills, ponds, channels, rivers and shores - any scene in short that took the fancy'. The same artist, he wrote, painted the walls of open galleries with views of seaside towns 'producing a charming effect at minimal cost'. A room in the villa outside Rome believed to have belonged to Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus, might illustrate this style of work (5,30). Flowering plants and trees of several types with brightly feathered birds perching on their branches completely encircle it, bringing permanently indoors a luxuriant garden of the type that was frequently integrated into the planning of larger Roman palaces and villas (5,33; 34). Beyond a narrow strip of grass, which visually extends the real space of the room, the world of nature is tantalizingly fenced off - as if to suggest the paradise of the 'Islands of the Blessed', where eternal summer reigned, as described by Horace in a poem written about this time.

Freshness and freedom of handling distinguish the finest of these Pompeiian and Roman decorative paintings. This can best be appreciated in isolated details, which often display quite extraordinary mastery and bravura (5,31). Such sophisticated delight in dexterity is much less evident in portraiture, however, an art form greatly cultivated by the Romans, especially in sculpture (see pp. 211-14). Pliny refers to lifelike portrayals of gladiators as having been 'for many generations the highest ambition of painting'. His remark may be sarcastic, but, in fact, portraits of relatively humble sitters are among the most arresting of the many paintings found at Pompeii. One, from the wall of a shop, is of a man and woman traditionally called the Baker and his Wife and probably a wedding picture (5,32). The features of the swarthy man are anything but patrician: he seems to be an ordinary tradesman (though he has been identified with Terentius Neo, a law student). The woman with her carefully dressed hair and pale complexion might seem to have higher social ambitions, the writing tablet and the stylus which she presses against her chin perhaps indicating literary interests. In the gesture of her hand there is a touch of affectation made more obvious by the plain, candid style of the painting itself. This and other equally direct and vivid portraits, some scenes of contemporary life - a riot in the amphitheatre, for instance - and grotesquely erotic caricatures on the walls of a brothel suggest that a vigorous popular art coexisted with the upper-class and rather high-flown paintings in the richer houses and public buildings.

Pompeii and Herculaneum show that by AD 79 every type of painting (every genre as they were later to be called) was being practised and patronized - history-painting, figure-painting, portraiture, landscape and still life. A system of perspective had been devised to give a sometimes illusionistic appearance of recession in space. Various pictorial styles had also been developed, ranging from hard linearity with flat areas of color to an impressionistic rendering of form with rapid flicks of the brush. When Pompeii and Herculaneum were at their heyday, however, Roman writers were already lamenting that the art of painting was in a bad way. The architectural theorist Vitruvius (fl. 46-32 BC) and later Pliny thought painting a 'dying art'; it was said to be 'completely dead' by Petronius, arbiter of elegance at the Emperor Nero's court and author of the brilliant bawdy novel Satyricon, in which a 'picture gallery with a marvellous collection of all kinds of painting' consisted exclusively of Greek and Hellenistic works:

I saw a work by the hand of Zeuxis which was not yet worn away with the injuries of age, and I beheld not without a certain awe the sketches of Protogenes which were so real that they vied with nature herself. And when I came upon the work of Apelles ...I actually worshipped it. For the outlines of the figures gave a rendering of natural appearances with such subtlety that you might even believe their souls had been painted.... (Petronius, Satyricon, AD 83, tr. J. J. Pollitt)

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It was, perhaps, to give the effect of such a collection that rooms like that in the House of the Vettii at Pompeii were painted.

Livy, the great historian of the Roman republic, declared that paintings robbed from the temples of Sicily in 211 BC initiated 'the craze for works of Greek art'. Such paintings were at first placed in public buildings as trophies of conquest. But private collectors appeared on the scene in the first century BC. One paid for a single fourth-century BC picture as much as 36,000 denarii, an enormous sum at a time when a capable slave cost 500 and a free labourer was paid around 250 a year. This collecting of Greek and Hellenistic 'old masters' by very rich Romans stimulated a demand for copies to grace the walls of those who could not obtain originals. Only now, significantly enough, did the conception of an 'original' and its corollary, a 'copy', first arise. Once it had, the copy was despised. The influential Stoic philosopher Seneca made a point of distinguishing between the divinely inspired artist of the past and the artisan copyists of his own day. Such views might be justified philosophically; yet one may question how far they were the cause and how far the effect of the high commercial value then being placed on originals in the 'old master' market.

Art collecting may also have played a part in transforming attitudes to artists and their work in other ways. Pictures that had been dedicated to the gods in a Greek sanctuary necessarily lost much, if not all, of their religious significance once they were removed to private residences in Italy. They were transformed into collectors' pieces, objects of luxury and status symbols. As a result, the rather occult aura which seems to have surrounded artists in earlier times was dimmed. Both Cicero and Seneca excluded painting from the 'liberal arts', the latter classifying painters simply as 'agents of extravagance'. That Nero dabbled in painting was often mentioned, but not as one of his virtues.

In the vast body of Latin literature there are few references to, and fewer words of praise for, contemporary painters. Not even their names would be known were it not for Pliny, and his remarks are extremely brief. (They end before AD 79, for he died while watching the fatal eruption of Vesuvius.) Although Romans were fascinated to the point of obsession by their political history, they wrote no histories of their visual arts. Very little is recorded about the artists who worked in Rome itself, let alone those in the provincial cities. It is not known whether they were of Italian or eastern Mediterranean origin, freemen or slaves. They were classed simply as artisans, beneath the attention of writers. In ancient Greece, disdain had sometimes been expressed for banausoi, a word that originally meant 'blacksmiths' but came to include all who worked with their hands, and this attitude hardened in Rome. Sculptors were as little regarded as painters or, for that matter, carpenters. The versatile writer Lucian (c. AD 120-200) described a sculptor as 'no more than a workman, doing hard physical labour ... obscure, earning a small wage, a man of low esteem, classed as worthless by public opinion, neither courted by friends, feared by enemies, nor envied by fellow citizens, but just a common workman, a craftsman, a face in a crowd, one who makes his living with his hands' {Dream 9 [13]). This may be an exaggeration, but even the greatest artists of the past were downgraded by the Romans, despite the prices and the praises commanded by their works. 'No gifted young man upon seeing the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia ever wanted to be Phidias', wrote the great moralist and biographer Plutarch (c. AD 46-120).'For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful because of its gracefulness, the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.'

Unlike painting and sculpture, architecture was regarded by Cicero as one of the liberal arts, that is to say one in which a free man (liberalis) might engage without loss of status. Vitruvius, himself a practising architect as well as a theorist, declared that 'persons can justly claim to be architects only if they have from boyhood mounted by the steps of their studies and, being trained generally in the knowledge of arts and sciences, have reached the temple of architecture at the top.' An architect, he demanded, 'should be a man of letters, a skilful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with scientific thought, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, knowledgeable about the opinions of jurists, and familiar with astronomy and the theory of the heavens'. How often these requirements were fulfilled is, of course, impossible to say. But there can be no doubt that the buildings which were to be Rome's greatest and most enduring contribution to the visual arts of the West were designed by men who not only combined artistic sensibility with great expertise in engineering, but also had the freedom of mind to break away from traditional methods of construction and accepted canons of judgement. They created an entirely new concept of architectural mass and space.

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE

The Romans' artistic genius was most fully expressed in architecture, the art in which their extraordinary gifts for organization and planning could find a natural outlet. They excelled in urban design and in new systematized construction methods, which facilitated large-scale programs for utilitarian and civic structures - roads, drainage systems, bridges, aqueducts, vast apartment blocks and public buildings of various kinds (see pp. 200-1). Temples and other religious edifices, so prominent hitherto in the history of architecture, now became relatively unimportant. It was essentially the same practical, managerial gifts which, in other fields, enabled the Romans to make their finest contributions to Western civilization: first Roman Law, that supreme expression of ancient probity from which Western legal codes derive; and secondly the Pax Romana, that century and a half's display of continuously expert and energetically efficient administration initiated by Augustus, which brought stability and peace to an empire covering the whole of Europe as far north as Scotland, the whole Mediterranean area and much of the Near East. The phenomenon was to be unique in world history.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 629